


Metamorphosis

by islasands



Series: Ben/Adam [2]
Category: Benedict Cumberbatch ("Sherlock") & Adam Lambert
Genre: Crossover Pairings, M/M, Power Dynamics, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-09
Updated: 2011-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 04:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is two years since Adam and Ben first met. Adam is facing yet another failed relationship. Ben has recently divorced. Change, in both of their lives, is imminent, but its agency comes from a most unexpected quarter. Or person...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis

Part 1

He leaned over the deck railing and looked at the lawn. His eyes were swimming and the blurring of their lenses, together with the gilding effects of the setting sun, gave the patches of moss a fluorescent quality.

His desire to cry was instantly diverted. He wiped his eyes and, as though by turning on a switch, began recording what he could see. On the hillside opposite there was a datura, which despite the lateness of the season was still covered in long pale trumpets with bright orange rims. Higher up on the hillside, silhouetted against the evening sky, the branches of a macrocarpa were hectic with emotion. They looked like arms that were protesting or beseeching, – in either case, ineffectively; their gestures were caused by the wind, and addressed to the wind. Closer at hand, covering a fence, a bougainvillea, stripped of its crimson decorations, had become a thatch of thorns. And even closer, upon his forearm, fine golden hairs were growing. They didn’t seem to be part of him. They were growing with the same inexplicable purpose as the trees and shrubs and grass, - and even the fiery clouds.

The recording ended as quickly as it had begun.

“Are you okay?” His friend put her hand on his back and gently moved it to and fro. “I wish there was something I could say,” she went on. “But I know there’s nothing. Don't worry. I bring no platitudes of comfort.”

Adam smiled at her. “I’m more okay than I think I am. I might even be happy. And it’s not because I’m jaded.” He paused. “ Though I should be jaded by now, shouldn’t I?” He sighed. He pulled a face. “I don’t think I make wrong choices.“ He suddenly looked into her eyes. “Or do I?”

His friend looked away before answering, which gesture made him realize he didn’t need to listen to her reply. She was going to lie. His mind drifted off again. He heard someone playing the piano. A child perhaps. The notes were discordant and they interested him. He mentally hummed them. It was time to go inside, join his friends, eat with them and then, if he had his way, get drunk. He hoped he would remember the notes. As he turned to leave he noticed something white fluttering down into the garden, white, and about the size of a snowflake.

“Hang on,” he said to his friend, who watched as he ran down the stairs and out onto the lawn. There it was. He picked it up. It was a torn piece of paper. In one corner there was a mark.

“What is it?” his friend called down.

“A message from the sky,” he said. “Nothing.” He put the scrap of paper in his pocket. But during dinner, when he was already quite drunk, he put his hand in his pocket and felt the piece of paper. He held it up in front of him, frowning at it’s small mark – the remains, perhaps, of a letter – and then looked around the table. “It is in the nature of tragedies,” he suddenly announced, “whether great or small, that insignificant things suddenly seem of great importance, -” The dinner guests fell silent. He wondered if he was quoting something or had just made the statement up himself.

His telephone rang. He pushed back his hair, then his chair, and crossed the room to answer it. His friends resumed their chatter. He wandered down the hallway, phone in hand, wondering whether or not he could be bothered talking to who-ever it was. He sat on his bed. He could hear a voice calling out from the phone. He slowly raised it to his ear.

“Adam? Adam? Is this you?”

Adam’s hand fell to the bed. His entire face winced in disbelief. He fell back onto the bed. He raised the phone to his ear again.

“Adam?”

Adam raised his other hand so that he could cradle the phone with both hands. Tears welled up and ran down the sides of his face, burning tears that cooled the moment they touched his ears.

“Ben,” he managed to say. But that was all he could say. He rolled over and put his hands – and the phone – between his legs. He wept. Someone came in, turned on the bedside lamp, and covered him up.

In the morning he wondered if he had dreamt it. He checked his phone for messages. Sure enough, Ben had called.

“I’m in LA. I want to see you but perhaps you’re – unavailable? Call me. Or not. It’s not important. Or it is.”

Adam fought off his desire to immediately return the call. This could be one of those ‘frying pan into the fire’ situations. He knew his proclivity for quickly drowning sorrows in pools of distraction rather than feeling them. He sat down at the piano. He struck a note and it triggered his memory. He tried to pick out the discordant notes he had heard the night before. He began to sing them. “Met-oh, met-oh, met-oh-morph–osis.” A vision of Ben appeared in his mind’s eye. There was a quizzical expression in his eyes, but not his lips. They looked thoughtful, hesitant, as though on the brink of saying something.

He got up, found a piece of paper, and sat back at the piano to write.

I can’t keep you  
Cuz love is not deciduous  
For all it’s photosynthesis  
Like sugar makes me green  
I’ll fall when the wind is strong enough...”

He turned off his phones, locked all doors, drew the curtains in his studio, and worked on the song all day. Then he got drunk again and passed out. Just before dawn he staggered downstairs, made a coffee, and went outside to watch the daybreak. It broke in a sky of such sheer, pale blue it reminded him of Ben’s gaze. Looking up at him from a pillow. He made the call.

Part 2

Ben walked out of the foyer of his hotel and straight into Adam’s arms. There was no time to appraise one another’s appearance. No time for bemusement at how unselfconsciously they were closing a two year gap. They freely drank each other in, sniffing each other’s skin, hair, clothing, and kissing favourite places, - an ear lobe, a frown crease, a cheekbone. They laughed into each other’s open mouths. They said whatever came into their heads, - endearments that were so extravagant they gaped at one another, eyebrows raised, so astonished by the intimacy of their utterances they could do nothing but seal them with kisses.

Then they wandered off with the aimlessness of lovers, the kind that heightens the ecstasy of knowing very well their inevitable destination. They spent the afternoon doing just this. They talked. They ate. But just when Adam was about to suggest they go home, Ben checked his watch and in an oddly embarrassed  flurry  of haste said he had to go, - but he would call later in the evening. Adam watched him leave. He realised they hadn’t once talked about their relationship statuses. He grinned. That was the way of it when they were together. They never allowed their private lives to intrude on _their_ privacy. He put on his sunglasses, leaned back on his chair and watched people seated at other tables. He began eavesdropping on the couple sitting behind him.

“I didn’t say you have to change. I said _we_ need to.”

“But you’re the one who’s unhappy. I had no idea you were unhappy.”

“That’s my point.”

“I’m not fucking clairvoyant.”

“You know what? I’m surprised by that. You’re not even here. You’re a sim of yourself. You send out your sim to do the unsavoury task of listening to me.”

Adam got up, paid the bill, and drove home. He spent an hour answering calls. Adam's manager was agitated because he had missed an important meeting. “They already know what I want on the cover,” Adam said. “It’s not up for discussion. If they don’t like it they can stick a fucking picture of my dick on it. That will satisfy my fans _and_ give my fucking role model status some grunt. I truly don’t give a fuck.”

He put on some music and ordered in some food.  He wandered through his house, remembering the domesticity that had so recently been part and parcel of his every waking moment. Ruefully, he remembered how sleep had become a refuge from that togetherness. He stood in front of the dresser in his bedroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He fingered a small heap of necklaces and rings. Why had he returned them? God, had he been such an arsehole that the guy didn’t want any reminders?  He opened a drawer and scooped them inside. “Yeah, that’s right,” a voice said in his head. “Out of sight, out of mind. Absence with you definitely doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. I am sick of waiting.”

The phone rang in his pocket. “I’m at the gate,” Ben said.

For a moment Adam hesitated. It struck him that with Ben the opposite seemed true. Two years without a single call and already his heart was racing. Two years he’d spent loving someone else – and not, apparently succeeding – yet here he was, on tenterhooks, waiting for a man who was not gay, not free, not his to love. Waiting for him to be lying beneath him, blue eyes critically scanning him with desire, sensitive lips turning down when he smiled, strong articulate hands ranging over his flesh, -searching for and understanding every part of him.

In a flash he remembered the first time he had looked into the eyes of his ex-partner and thought how shallow a pool lay in his gaze. A paddling pool of life. He had chased the thought away by closing his eyes. He had tried to recapture the freedom of their first meeting when his new love had seemed like the personification of summer. Yes, he’d arrived in his heart like summer and he had run into that relationship like a boy running down a dune, arms outspread, not a care in the world.

He ran down the stairs. Ben looked slightly wary. Adam laughed. “I am alone,” he said. “And now you’re here, I am well and truly alone. “ They kissed in the doorway. It was more thoughtful than passionate. There was a cold wind yet neither felt the need to search for warmth.

“I want to fuck you like there’s no tomorrow,” Ben said, but his voice was gentle, almost sad. “And I mean, no tomorrow.” There was a long pause.

“A leaf must fall,” Adam said.

They stood together and looked out at the hills and houses.

“We’re like crocuses,” Ben said. “We come out in the autumn when every other flower has the good sense to stay in bed.”

“What colour?”

“Um. Purple. Pale purple.”

“We’re nearly gay,” Adam said. They laughed. They went straight upstairs. They undressed quickly but without fuss. They purposefully pulled back the bed-covers and climbed under them. It was only then, doused in the shock of their naked bodies touching, that the storm was awoken. It was a wintry storm. Their passion was resolute for being so inevitable. When Adam slid his fingers inside Ben, making his stomach involuntarily incuvate, the expression on his face, looking down at Ben, was as silent and impassive as snow falling. Ben relaxed upwards, mentally, into that fall. His mouth grimaced as Adam pushed himself inside. They were so keenly aware of where their flesh met and where it didn’t that they held their breaths. The gaps between them became as palpable as their touches. As Adam pressed in deeper he covered Ben’s face with his hand. He wanted to feel his thoughts. Feel the words that his lips were not speaking.

Suddenly, and without warning, he unfastened the lock on his desperation.  He man-handled Ben down the bed and pulled up his legs. Ben’s body, and the bed itself, blurred together in his mind. He felt as though he was driving his cock into sheets of snow. He was fucking to survive his feelings for this man. He was fucking to draw blood. And Ben obliged. A seam of red fire was flowing through his body, shunting up from his prostate and coursing through him until it entered his throat. He bit his lip.  

As soon as Adam was capable of kissing him the drop of blood was gone. He licked it’s salty benediction away while he groped beneath him, searching for Ben’s erection.

Ben wrapped his legs around him. He stroked the dark head lolling on his shoulder blade. He stared at the ceiling.

“I want to hear you sing,” he said.

Part 3

And he fully intended to do so. In a week or so Adam would be performing at a private launch party for his new album. Ben, who in fact was non-committal about the prospective length of his stay, avowed he would be there.

As it turned out, they hadn’t spent as much time together as Adam thought they would. Nor were their meetings unequivocally intimate. Adam thought about this as he sat on his deck, watching the reflections of clouds creating patches of depth in the pool. Something was different. Something had changed or was changing.

He called Ben and organized to pick him up. He wanted to get out of the city, out of interior spaces. Out of bed. A friend owned a beach house at Paradise Cove, not far from the city. He called and organized a time to pick up the key.

It was sunny when they set out but as though on cue for their preferred atmospheric conditions the sky abruptly darkened and squalls of rain drove against the car windscreen. Ben leant his head on Adam as they drove. There was nothing to say. When they arrived at the beach house they walked in the entrance, though the house, straight out on to the deck and down the stairs that led down to the beach. They looked at each other, then at the sea, then back at each other.

Ben started to run down the beach, tearing off clothes as he ran. He stumbled and fell as he was pulling down his pants. Adam wandered down after him. He was in no hurry. He surveyed his surroundings. The sea was the colour of the clouds and beach, - the same lifeless grey as the grey of dead digital screens. Only the sun could switch it all back on again. It all comes down to electricity, he thought, to solar neurons, the visible thoughts of the sun, and as though to underline his metaphor the sun suddenly found a gap in the clouds. The heavy, dull swell turned into a living mirror, a section of the sky revealed its blue undergarments, Ben’s body changed from pale white to pale gold. Adam focused on that body.

Close to the shore the wave’s broken crests had formed a milling bed of foam that quite suddenly had become dazzling. He watched Ben gathering up armfuls of the foam and using them to lather his body, watched him suddenly dive into a wave and emerge further out. A gull flew directly overhead. He looked up at the smooth sculpture of its undercarriage. He thought of the smoothness of Ben’s shoulder blades. He turned and went back into the house.

By the time he returned to the beach, towels in hand, Ben was nowhere to be seen. He scanned the beach, left and right. The sun had gone out. The sea looked bleak . Where was he? This was a safe beach. He was not a good swimmer but had swum here with confidence. He dropped the towels. Ah, there he was. He waited. The clouds closed the gap in their curtains. A gull flying out to sea suddenly stalled. It began to bank to and fro, gliding down onto the sea’s surface like a piece of paper. In just such a way Ben had appeared in his life.

“You won’t believe it, “ Ben said, stepping into to the towel Adam was offering, “but it’s warm. Warmer than the air.”

“You’re freezing now,” Adam observed, drying his face and hair with the other towel.

“I like this solicitous you,” Ben said.”I feel like a kid.”

“You look like one,” Adam smiled, “with snot running out your nose.” Ben wiped it with the back of his hand.

When they returned to the house Adam decided against joining Ben in the shower. He searched through his friend’s music collection and made his selection. Gorecki’s “Sorrowful Songs” filled the room. He went to the open door and looked at the sea. He liked the way their afternoon was unfolding, liked the new absence of urgency in his proximity to Ben, liked the sombre light over the sea, the sound of the woman singing for her lost son. For once he could simply feel rather than apprehend his loneliness. It was strangely pleasureable. Ben came and stood behind him, wrapped his arms around him. They listened to the music without speaking.

Adam turned and took him in his arms. “I was thinking how nice it is not to want you. Sexually, I mean....” He trailed off, unsure of what he was trying to say. Ben’s cool blue gaze lingered on Adam’s lips. Alarm bells were ringing. He was hoping to hear something he had thus far not wanted or needed to hear.

“I like you because you’re fallible,” Adam said decisively. “Like weather,” he added, by way of explanation.

Ben grinned but not because his fears were allayed. They both looked down at the same time.

“Oh,” Adam laughed. “I spoke too soon. Or else, this just proves it and the sun of us just came out.” They drew each other close, letting the light touch of their mutual arousal find expression in the crescendo of the song.

“I have to go,” Ben said. “I have to meet someone.”

Adam pushed him away. "That is not what I meant by fallible,” he exclaimed. “That’s just plain, I don't know, plain something.” Ben shrugged. Adam examined his face. He was disappointed but not displeased. He knelt in front of Ben and parted his bathrobe. A sense of mystery enveloped them when the music stopped.

Part 4 __

As soon as he was home - alone - Adam felt restless. He poured a drink and took it outside. He walked down a stone path that circled the house, leading to an enclosed garden. He opened the wooden door and realised, looking around, that he seldom visited this part of his domicile. For a moment it almost felt that he was intruding on someone else’s property and he even wondered why there was no seating.  He looked up at the side of the house that comprised one of the garden’s walls. The rest were concrete block. Beyond them the curving tree-clad  hillside rose up and ended in sky. Upstairs the decking, pool and adjacent gardens faced the sun and looked out over the valley. No wonder this garden, set in a hollow, was not frequented.

But closer inspection revealed the garden’s contemplative attributes. Whether it was the shade, or the protection from winds, the foliage of the trees and shrubs seemed darker, more lusciously green. He looked up at the tallest tree, spreading in a corner, whose leaves were stiff and deeply creased. Each leaf resembled a book that was partially open. The upper surface was a glassy green, the underside a soft, velvety brown. He noticed something glittering on one the leaves and reached up to investigate. A family of irridiscent blue ladybugs was clustered on the leaf. He touched one with his finger but it didn’t react. Perhaps they were sleeping.

“I should put a table down here. And seats.” he thought. “I should dine down here, with lots of candles. It would be like dining in the apse of a cathedral.”

He released the leaf and sipped his drink. He let his thoughts surface for air. “What I really should do is find out why he’s avoiding me. Why can’t I visit him at his hotel? _Is_ he really staying in one? And who else is he seeing? And why the hell is he here? In LA? It’s not solely on my account. Or is it?” He remembered Ben’s message. He took his phone out of his pocket, found the message and listened to it.  “I’m in LA. I want to see you but perhaps you’re – unavailable? Call me. Or not. It’s not important. Or it is.”

Adam put his drink on the ground. He returned his attention to the ladybugs. He slid one of them off the leaf and manoeuvred it into the centre of his palm. He nudged it but it didn’t move. Perhaps it was dead. Perhaps they all were. Perhaps that’s what they do when summer is over and the boxes of mating and procreating have been successfully ticked.  “What the fuck does that mean –“It’s not important, or it is.” he asked himself. In frustration he flicked the ladybug off his hand.

And then his mouth dropped open. He remembered Ben saying "I want to fuck you like there's no tomorrow. And I mean no tomorrow." And that remark about whether or not he was available. He'd crossed the ocean to find out if he was available! But could that really happen? Could such a brief liason - and a two year gap without contact - really lead to this - a completely mutual availability? Then why was he so unforthcoming about his intentions? Why did he keep disappearing on him? What was he concealing? He had to know.

He called Ben and was elated when he said he wasn’t at the hotel but could meet him at the bar they had visited the night before. He would find him and they each would profess and confess. Quite what, he didn't know. He didn't care. He was willing, for once in his life, to throw caution to the wind - and to give himself away. He didn't care if the idea of beginning a relationship with Ben was based on such flimsy grounds it was ludicrous. All he knew was that Ben suited him. Everything about him suited him.

But when he arrived at the bar, and saw the look on Ben’s face when he rose to greet him, his confidence plummeted. They sat down. Their hands, as though of their own accord, crept across the table and began to privately talk. They watched them twining and caressing.

“You’re leaving,” Adam said.

“Yes,” Ben replied. "I have to go back."

“How fallible of you,” Their eyes met. Ben smiled.

“I suppose so.”

Adam sent the message “withdraw” to his hand but it refused to obey. He watched it as it slid over Ben’s hand and tightly held his wrist.

“Do you know,” he said casually, “you are the only person I‘ve ever known who makes me lose my head. If you knew what a controlling fucker my head is...”

“I think I do know,” Ben said. “I wonder if it will let you miss me."

Adam couldn’t answer. What did he mean? His emotional temperature dropped sufficiently for him to withdrew his hand. He looked around the cafe. A pianist was sitting down to play for the lunch crowd. He felt irritated when she began to play.

“Why are you here?’ Adam asked. “I mean, in LA.”

He watched Ben’s mouth as it spoke but didn’t listen to his answer. All he wanted, at that moment, was to be inside him. In his mouth. His anus. His nostrils. His ears.  Every damn orifice of his body. Every pore of his fallible skin.

“Get up,” he said, interrupting whatever it was that Ben was saying. He took his arm and led him out. The waiter scurried after them. “Put it on my tab,” Adam said. “We don’t have tabs,” the waiter protested. By now they were on the pavement. “Wait here,” Adam said but when he returned Ben was gone. Adam ran to his car and returned to Ben’s hotel. He waited. Sure enough Ben arrived in a cab, jumped out and entered the hotel. Adam followed him. He watched him enter an empty elevator.  He took note of the floor - Floor 38. He took the adjacent elevator and when he cautiously emerged saw Ben at the end of the corridor, opening the door to a room. He heard him speaking to someone.

When he got home he turned off his phone. It had rung constantly from the moment he left the hotel. He went and laid on his bed. He got up and sat on a couch in the sitting room. He went outside and leant over the deck railing. He decided to have a shower but when he went into the bathroom he was so alarmed by his reflection in the mirror that he turned tail and went outside again. “He’s turned me into a fucking Goldilocks in my own house!” he said as he made his way down to the walled garden. He stood stock still in its centre, shoulders hunched, one arm across his chest, the other bent so that his fist covered his mouth. A bird startled out of one of the trees and almost flew into him. He vaguly remembered the ladybug. He vaguely regretted removing it from its little colony. Perhaps it was suffering, separated from its family.

He made a decision. He ran upstairs and called a cab. If Ben wasn’t there or wouldn’t see him then he wanted to get drunk. He didn’t care that he had a rehearsal to attend. The thought of it, and of performing the next day, appalled him.

His resolve didn’t falter, not even when a woman answered the door to room 38. She said Ben wasn’t there. She asked if he would like to wait as he had said he wouldn’t be long. Adam went inside. He answered her questions about how he knew Ben. She made him a drink. It was his turn to ask questions.

“And are you Mrs Cumberbatch?” he asked lightly.

“Good Lord, no,” she laughed. “Ben and I are close, but not incestuously. He's my brother.” She began to explain further, but was distracted by a sound. “Excuse me a moment,” she said. He heard her bustling about in another room. She called out, asking if he could help her close a suitcase. He should have been surprised by her relaxed familiarity but he wasn't. She didn't just physically resemble Ben, she was also similarly direct.

By the time Ben returned Adam and Julia were outside on the balcony. She had filled him in. She knew all about Adam. She knew exactly why Ben had come here. She knew how uncertain Ben was - and she knew the reasons why. She had encouraged him to come and had accompanied him in order to make his trip possible. She had explained Ben's divorce. And the custody arrangements.

Adam turned to greet Ben. His sister smiled at him and then slipped away.

“Look what I found,” Adam said. “It fell out of the sky, straight into my arms.”

Ben smiled his smile that went down at the corners. He went and stood next to Adam. "It is a "he," he said wryly.

Adam stared at him, widening his eyes,as though he was offended.“You came to get me!” he said. There was a victorious note to his voice. “All that way. So did he. Look. He likes me already.”

Ben couldn’t think of an answer.

“Apparently we’ve been courting,” Adam went on, “for two whole years. Two whole years of complete and utter silence. And in that space of time you somehow have acquired a closet and gone in and out of it. You have made more of yourself and brought him to meet me. No, don’t do that. I don’t want kissing. And don’t say anything. I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all. It’s all been so underhand.” The jubilant note was even more pronounced.

Ben put his arm across Adam’s shoulder but Adam shrugged it off.

Ben licked his finger. He made to wipe off a mark on his son’s pale cheek.

“No, don’t,” Adam said. “I like it. It's a lucky mark. Reminds me of something. Make yourself useful. Go and fetch us something. I’m sure we need something. I just can’t think what it is.”

“It must be some kind of metamorphosis,” he thought as he turned to watch Ben walking inside the house. “I've gone from falling in love, - like a stone, to floatinginto it. Like a piece of paper. More or less out of nowhere." Love. There, he had said it.

He looked down at the toddler. “It’s called obliviano’,” he said, informatively. The infant reached up and took hold of his nose, squeezing so tightly that Adam’s eyes watered.

  



End file.
